It was a normal day in Jagdeep Singh's suburban Yuba City home. His elderly mother was out in the garage. The family keeps the garage door slightly open to allow their dog to look out through a wire gate into the street.
Suddenly, a bloody feathered form streaked into the garage through the gaps in the gate. It was one of Yuba City's thousands of feral chickens, and its head had been removed by a neighborhood dog.
"The dog just took his head apart. It was so horrible, " Singh said. "And [my mother] was screaming in the garage 'What's Happening?!'"
There's still dried blood baked into the cement of the driveway. The vicious neighborhood dog hasn't scared the chickens away either, and they still flock around the house daily.
Incidents like these are common in Yuba City, which has a population of thousands of uncontrolled feral chickens living alongside residents. They're everywhere — along the highways, in store parking lots, and especially in suburban neighborhoods.
The living chickens flock together and wander from yard to yard. Some people feed them and leave out bowls of water. A few houses down from Singh's, someone had left a scattering of tortilla strips. There were around a dozen birds orbiting the pile and taking shelter under nearby cars.
The attack of the headless chicken wasn't the only bad experience Singh and his family have had with the wild birds. They often jump over their backyard fence and into their bushes. They poop everywhere along the perimeter of the house. At the crack of dawn, roosters in the neighborhood crow constantly, waking everyone up whether they want to or not.
Singh's wife Mandip said chickens also snuck into her friend's apartment through the front door. She said they were worried the chickens could get their infant sick, since she was crawling on the floor by the birds.
A brief and contested history of the Yuba City chickens
Nobody's quite sure exactly how the feral chickens came to roost in Yuba City. There are two prevailing theories. One is that a poultry transport truck flipped over on the highway, spilling the birds into the town. The other is that a livestock auction yard in town closed down and released the remaining chickens when it finally closed its doors.
Either way, the chickens have been surviving, and thriving, in the town for well over a decade. They've even adapted to life in a modern suburban town.
"These Chickens are smart," said Yuba City Mayor Shon Harris. "When they cross the highway, they use the crosswalk."
A cry for help
Singh said he's tried and failed to get the attention of local government agencies.
"They grow very fast, every month, every two months, they just keep going," Singh said of their chicken population. "We cannot wait for any disease to come up and they die. They need to figure out some solution for this."
Singh reached out to some county officials, but was told there were no health warnings in effect for the chickens. One county official told him that he could trap chickens himself and bring them into the local animal services office, as long as he called first to make sure the office had room for the birds.
While reporting on this story, NSPR also reached out to various federal, state and county agencies to find out whose responsibility it is to monitor and handle the feral chickens.
The Sutter County Department of Environmental Health Services said it had "nothing to do" with monitoring or controlling the feral chicken population. The United States Department of Agriculture told NSPR to contact the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), as it did not have any involvement in feral chickens.
The regional CDFA office said it was not responsible for the chickens, since they were feral and not farm animals. They directed NSPR to contact the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW).
In turn, a CDFW official with the Wildlife Health Laboratory told NSPR that chickens are domestic animals, and fall under the jurisdiction of the CDFA.
None of the organizations contacted by NSPR at the county, state, or federal levels reported monitoring the chickens for disease, or being responsible for controlling their population.
Feral chickens could spread diseases
While some residents may see the feral chickens as a nuisance, others like Singh are worried about disease, particularly avian influenza.
"Back in India, when people kept chickens, once they get the flu in the morning, by 6 o'clock everybody’s [all the chickens are] dead. They die in hours," Singh said. "I'm absolutely concerned something's going to happen over here."
His concerns are justified — the state is currently in the middle of a bird flu epidemic. The strain of the virus - H5N1 - has killed millions of chickens in the state. This year, it spread to cattle, and 31 cases have been reported in humans in California so far this year.
"It's the largest animal disease outbreak we've had in the history of food animal agriculture. That dates back over 5000 years," said University of California, Davis Professor Maurice Pitesky. "If you look at this from a geographical perspective, it's on six continents. If you look at it from a species perspective, it's in wild birds, domesticated birds, wild mammals, domesticated mammals, and now it's in humans."
Pitesky studies avian influenza, and how it spreads between animals. He said the virus is often carried by waterfowl like geese and ducks, who spread the virus in their breath and excrement. Geese particularly spread the virus as they migrate to the Sacramento Valley during the winter months. From there it can jump to chickens, who continue to spread the virus.
"[Infected chickens] can spread disease, not just by touching them, but [from] cleaning up their feces, touching things that they touched," Pitesky said. "There's definitely increased risk with any kind of feral animal, and we're dealing with a very unique situation here with highly pathogenic avian influenza."
So far the cases where the virus has spread to humans have resulted in mild symptoms like eye infections. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most of the cases have been among farm workers, particularly those that work with cattle. But the more the virus spreads, the more likely it is to mutate into something more severe to humans.
While Pitesky studies avian influenza in farm settings, he said the conditions in Yuba City could likely spread influenza and other diseases to members of the public. On a single block of small apartment buildings in town, there were over 60 chickens plus half a dozen dead ones in various states of decay. Many driveways were Jackson Pollock-ed with polka dots of chicken poop. Pitesky said that level of uncontrolled contact with the birds, as well as with their waste and their carcasses, are likely vectors for disease.
"Feral animals are dangerous from a public health perspective, because they can be exposed to all kinds of bacteria and viruses that, in a controlled setting like a barn or coop, they're just not as exposed to," he said. "Poultry can carry salmonella and campylobacter. Those are bacterial diseases that can [also] cause disease in humans."
Pitesky agrees with Singh that something should be done about the population to keep it under control.
"My recommendation would be not to feed them," he said. "And in a perfect world, there needs to be an effort made to reduce and/or eliminate the feral population of these birds in the community."
Plan for population control fizzles out
In the past, the Yuba City government set up a program to help relocate some of the chicken population. Dubbed Feathers to Farms, it found local farms in need of chickens and collaborated with the Sutter Animal Services Authority to trap and transport the animals.
"I believe we had upwards of 700 chickens that were re-homed to farms, " said Yuba City Mayor Shon Harris. "But then it became problematic, because we started running out of people willing to take them, especially the roosters, and so it just kind of faded."
He said the chickens, ever clever, had also learned to recognize the animal services trucks and would run away from workers trying to trap them. The program has laid dormant in recent years.
Harris himself doesn't mind the chickens and the early-morning wake-up calls they bring with them. Before being interviewed by NSPR, Harris said he talked with county health department officials who believe the birds do not pose a disease or health concern to the public.
"If they started becoming a critical mass and overflowing again [the city would] probably resurrect the Feathers to Farms program," Harris said. "But as of right now they're not a danger. They're not attacking people."
He said that homeowners unhappy with the disturbance brought by the chickens should install fencing and other preventative measures to keep the chickens out. He likened it to rural residents needing to erect fences to protect their land from deer.
As for the scores of chickens currently living in the city, Harris is open to making deals.
"If anybody would want a chicken or ten, just let us know," he said. "We can make that happen."
